El Capitan: The Movie

JOHN EVANS COULDN'T MAKE IT, so Denny
had to find another climber. He asked Chuck
Pratt, who'd done rigging on the Sentinel Rock
film, but the tedium of moviemaking didn't
appeal to him. Tompkins suggested Argentine
alpinist Jose Luis Fonrouge, who was staying
with Tompkins and climbing in Yosemite that
spring. Although Fonrouge was just twenty-six,
three years earlier he'd made the second ascent
of Fitz Roy—putting up a new route, alpinestyle,
on that fearsome peak. (Fonrouge died
in 2001.) When they filmed a screen test of
Fonrouge climbing, the rest of the team was
unimpressed. "Colliver and McCracken refused
to climb with Fonrouge," says Padula. "They
thought he was too cavalier."

"I liked that Fonrouge was from a different
place," adds Tompkins. "It would put some
spice into the film. But he wasn't very good.
He didn't talk much."

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Tompkins next pushed for his friend Yvon
Chouinard. Denny and Padula shot some
footage of Chouinard as well, but he didn't
seem interested in the project. Tompkins then
suggested including himself.

"Tompkins said, 'These guys aren't interesting
personalities,'" Denny recalls. "'Let's
get Fonrouge in there. And I'll be the other
guy.' I said, 'No. I can't slap these guys in the
face.' I wasn't going to kick my friends out.
Doug didn't like that."

"I wanted to be up there with guys who
had already been up there," Denny adds.
"Doug said, 'It'll be more fresh.' I said, 'It'll
be fresh enough.' Then Tompkins was heavily
pushing Yvon."

Finally, Tompkins suggested Lito
Tejada-Flores, a jovial climber who'd been
McCracken's college roommate years
before. "Lito blossomed the whole project,"
Padula says. "He was full of energy
and enthusiasm. It was contagious. Lito
was a miracle. He saved the film."

THE SHOOTING WAS SCHEDULED to
begin in May before the Valley heated up.
But Padula had problems with the sound
equipment. The range of the wireless mics
was limited. The transmitting hardware
that each climber had to wear was the size
of a coffee-table book. After some cajoling,
the electronics tech was able to shrink the
hardware down to the size of a cigarette box.
They hid the mics in tubular webbing that
the climbers slung over their shoulders. Denny's
girlfriend Ellen Fry sewed up the battery
packs and transmitting boxes into vests for
the climbers to wear. To boost the signals,
they trailed aerials down their pant legs.
Tejada hung hardware off the webbing hiding
his mic, which ripped the wiring off. It never
worked quite right again. They needed someone
to change tapes in the recording shed,
but they couldn't afford a real sound tech. A
young man named Art Rochester, who was in
the Valley recording birdsongs, volunteered to
help out. All the tinkering delayed filming by
weeks. "Denny begins his film of the El Cap
Nose," Roper jotted in his diary on May 20.

Over the next few weeks, the climbers
fixed lines to El Cap Tower, about halfway up.
Denny filmed the climbing from below, then
ascended the fixed line, pulled up the rope and
asked the team to re-lead the pitch so he could
film from above. He also hung from ropes and
filmed a third lead from the side. Denny was
so absorbed in filming that more than once he
forgot to attach himself to his Jumars, jugging
the fixed line with nothing securing him to the
rope except his grip. "It wasn't like normal climbing,"
says Colliver. "It was a job."

Denny shouldered an Arriflex 16mm camera
with a heavy belt of batteries around his waist.
The camera shot 100-foot loads of film, which
would normally translate into fewer than three
minutes of film time. But you had to change film
in absolute darkness, which was impractical on a
wall, so Denny shaded the camera with his body,
knowing that part of every roll would be ruined
by light exposure. "I'd get about two minutes of
usable footage from each roll," he says. "We could
get thorough coverage of about two pitches a day.
We thought it would take a month, but it took
two. We were learning as we were going."

At night, they rappelled back to the ground.
After every day of shooting, someone had to drive
the film nearly 200 miles to San Francisco, wait for
it to be processed, and drive it back to Valley for
viewing in the crew house. When one batch came
back, Padula couldn't find Denny. It turned out he'd hiked to the top of El Cap to photograph Royal Robbins finishing
a ten-day ascent of the Muir Wall, the first time anyone had soloed the
Big Stone.

"Doug got very discouraged seeing this stuff," Padula says. "I saw it
as problems we could correct. Doug said, 'Oh God, I got all this money
tied up, and it's not working out.' There was friction between Glen and
Doug. Doug had visions of another Endless Summer. Glen was going to
make this beautiful art film. Doug said, 'These guys don't know what the
hell they're doing.' He was right."

"I didn't like the way it was going," Tompkins says. "It was going to
end up being flat. The conversations recorded between the climbers were
boring and repetitive. In five minutes, the audience is going to be bored."

ON MAY 25, Fonrouge and Rick Sylvester decided to climb the Nose
on their own. The two had done a handful of routes in the Valley, including
an attempt to link up Royal Arches with the South Face of North
Dome—a climb that included a bivy and ended with a retreat from
North Dome. On another occasion, Fonrouge failed to tie a tagline correctly
and dropped the rope halfway up the pitch. Sylvester himself had
never done a big wall and had only a few pitches of aid under his belt.
For the Nose, Fonrouge showed up with some unexpected equipment:
a 16mm camera. He had an assignment, he told Sylvester, to film the
ascent for Argentine television. The first part of the climb didn't go well.
Fonrouge got off route in the Stoveleg Crack and took a whipper, which
put a deep rope burn in Sylvester's hand. The duo failed to make it to
Dolt Tower by dark, and Sylvester spent the night trying to sleep standing
in slings. Fonrouge plucked a hammock out of the haulbag for the
bivy. Near the Great Roof, Fonrouge, according to Sylvester, pulled a
large block loose. "We had been warned about it," Sylvester says. "I
heard shouts from below. I waited for sounds of an ambulance but I
didn't hear anything."

Low on El Cap, the film team was jugging their fixed lines.
McCracken was 300 feet up, followed by Denny, Colliver and Tejada,
who was just leaving the ground. McCracken heard an explosion. High
above him, he saw a block the size of a fridge hurtling through space.
It fell like a bomb, not touching the wall for hundreds of feet, until
it struck the slabs above McCracken. The rock exploded into pieces,
sounding like canon fire and filling the air with the smell of sulfur.

"We all had to clean our pants out after that," says McCracken. "It
really should have wiped us out. It's a miracle that no one was hurt or
the ropes cut."

FROM EL CAP TOWER, Colliver led up the Texas Flake and climbed
Harding's decade-old bolt ladder toward the Boot Flake. A bolt snapped.
Colliver fell, landing on his side and badly bruising his ribs. The fall was
captured on audio but not on film. Even Denny wasn't going to ask
Colliver to do that again. They retreated to the ground. Colliver wanted
to quit the film. "Gary told Glen, 'How could you expect Fred to make
a film about this? He doesn't know anything about climbing,'" Padula
recalls. "I was asking myself the same thing."

Denny kept filming with just two climbers. McCracken lowered
Tejada half a ropelength to do the King Swing: the huge pendulum that's
one of the most thrilling—and scary—moments of climbing the Nose.
Denny filmed it on the wall and from a helicopter. It was exhausting
running back and forth along the blank stone trying to grab the elusive
crack on the left. When Tejada finally caught the edge, Denny flew past
in the helicopter holding a white piece of paper on which he scrawled
in Magic Marker: Do it again. Denny did that about a dozen times that
day. "I drove Lito crazy asking him for take after take on the Boot Flake,"
Denny says. "I kept asking the helicopter pilot to get closer and closer."
Tompkins suggested they film the whole thing from the helicopter.
Denny just shook his head.

Tompkins had a lot on his mind. His wife Susie was expecting their
second child any week now. And, more pressingly, Tompkins was weeks
away from leaving for a six-month expedition to Patagonia with Chouinard
and Tejada. He issued an ultimatum: He wanted to direct or he
was out. "You guys don't know what you're doing," Tompkins said. He
handed Padula the checkbook for the project's bank account and walked
away. "They had a vision," Tompkins says. "I had a different one."

When I go to visit him, Tompkins and I sit in the living room of one
of his many homes, this one on a hill in Patagonia, Chile, overlooking
the national park that he's building in the Valle Chacabuco with his new
wife, Kris. Herds of guanacos graze outside the window. Tompkins made
a fortune in the business world before cashing out in 1990 and devoting
his considerable energies to conservation work in South America.

"We could have really made something," he says wistfully, as if the
movie were never made.